Creating the Mediterranean

Maps and the Islamic Imagination

Series:

In
Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination Tarek Kahlaoui treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean. It tracks the history of the Islamic visualization of the sea from when geography was created by the Islamic state’s bureaucrats of the tenth century C.E. located mainly in the central Islamic lands, to the later men of the field, specifically the sea captains from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries C.E. located in the western Islamic lands. A narrative has emerged from this investigation in which the metamorphosis of the identity of the author or mapmaker seemed to be changing with the rest of the elements that constitute the identity of a map: its reader or viewer, its style and structure, and its textual content.

Biographical Note

Tarek Kahlaoui, Ph.D. (2008), Rutgers University, is Assistant Professor of Islamic art history and Islamic civilisation. He is working on projects concerning the history and archaeology of the Maghrib and the Mediterranean and has published numerous articles on the topic.

Readership

All those interested on pre-modern Mediterranean cartography, Islamic visual culture in the Mediterranean, and Islamic civilisation.